Vorbis

Vorbis is a patent-clear, fully open general purpose audio encoding format standard that rivals or surpasses the 'upcoming' generation of proprietary coders (AAC and TwinVQ, also known as VQF). There is no raw Vorbis stream defined, instead the Vorbis codec is always (?) used in the Ogg container format for audio files, and was called Ogg Vorbis for long time since the Ogg container was quasi exclusive for Vorbis. Later FLAC audio codec and Theora and Dirac video codecs began to be used inside Ogg too, and in 2010 the WebM format was defined using the Vorbis codec inside the WebM container, rather than Ogg.

libvorbis, a BSD-licensed source implementation of Vorbis as a library is available; See the Ogg Vorbis page for documentation, downloads and distribution terms.

Further, many players support Ogg Vorbis; see vorbis.com for a list of all the players we know about.